Research Guide to American Literature

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH

1. Kindred is the first novel to have a contemporary character confront the reality
   of history and experience slavery. The novel opens: “The trouble began long
   before June 9, 1976, when I became aware of it, but June 9 is the day I remem-
   ber. It was my twenty-sixth birthday. It was the day I met Rufus—the day he
   called me to him for the first time.” Apparently, Dana’s “trouble” began “long
   before” her violent physical encounter with the past. Butler’s narrative structure
   challenges her protagonist (and readers) to examine actively the relationship
   between slavery and contemporary America. How do you understand this
   relationship? How well are you able to negotiate the ambiguities presented by
   the conflation of time? Why does Dana travel through time? Why is her first
   interaction with the past rendered so ambiguously? What is the “trouble” to
   which she refers? Why does the past intrude so violently on Dana’s present?


2. There is critical consensus that Kindred is a feminist re-envisioning of
   nineteenth-century black women’s slave narratives, such as Mary Prince’s The
   History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (1831), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in
   the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and Lucy Delaney’s From the Darkness Cometh
   the Light (1891). Students will find it profitable to research slave narratives
   and then consider how Butler rewrites the traditional narrative through the
   “enslaved” Alice and the “emancipated” Dana. In what ways do these characters
   challenge those designations? How do they invite us to think through present
   social concerns? What do you see as this narrative’s relevancy? Is this narra-
   tive technique the best vehicle to illustrate the connection between the past
   and the present? For background reading on the structure of slave narratives,
   consult Robert Levine’s “The Slave Narrative and the Revolutionary Tradi-
   tion of American Autobiography,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African
   American Slave Narrative, edited by Audrey A. Fisch (Cambridge, England:
   Cambridge University Press, 2007). See also Frances Smith Foster’s introduc-
   tions to Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives
   (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994) and Written by Herself: Liter-
   ary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892 (Bloomington: Indiana
   University Press, 1993).


3. Critic Guy Mark Foster argues that some scholars focus their critical read-
   ings of Kindred almost entirely on slavery to the exclusion of “the narrative of
   consensual interracial desire,” that is, Dana and Kevin’s marriage. Yet, in Dana’s
   character, Butler has constructed a contemporary black woman who reflects
   the complexity of her past and present. Her marriage to a white male adds
   another layer to this complexity. What is Butler’s purpose? What do you make
   of Dana’s silence on issues of race and politics? What does this narrative sug-
   gest about the possibilities for Dana and Kevin’s relationship and, by extension,
   black/white relationships?


4. Influenced by the politics of its time—the 1960s black arts and power move-
   ments (resistance to integrationist principles represented by mainstream
   culture) and the emergence of “colorblind” principles of the 1970s, but well
   before critical whiteness studies (whiteness as a racial construct that functions
   as invisible power) in the 1990s—Kindred is even more important today in the

Octavia Butler 171